We are down to the wire for achieving 2019 goals… how did you do? Did you hit your numbers? Did you achieve the things you wanted? While some goals are very tangible and measurable (hitting sales goals, achieving your desired ACOS, etc.), there are plenty of goals and achievements that you won’t find on a spreadsheet. Let’s talk about some of those metrics you might want to look at as you’re wrapping up the year?
Sales Numbers
As product sellers, sales are the number one metric used to measure success. If you met or surpassed sales goals, that’s reason enough to pop open the bubbly! Congrats! If you didn’t, take some time to reflect on where you fell short. Was there a certain quarter that was lacking, and caused a deficit the rest of the year? If so, how can you make that quarter more robust the coming year?
Engagement
Our clients who see the best results selling online (Amazon or elsewhere) are definitely striving to not only sell products, but they are looking to improve the lives of their customers with those products. They are genuinely concerned with who is buying their product, what they want from the brand, and meeting those needs. Take some time to reflect on how your customers interacted with you this year. Did you boost your social media numbers and offer free content that was valuable to your community? Think about how you can, in the coming year, provide more value to your customers, and really encourage your customers to become fans instead of seeing your product as a simple transaction. Afterall, engaged customers will be the ones that become repeat buyers and your first purchasers as you launch new products!
Customer Service
This is such a critical part of the success of any business, online or elsewhere and I want you to think about how you improved the customer service experience this year. Did you respond to questions being asked or address critical reviews? How quickly and efficiently did you resolve issues for unhappy customers? Even if you really excelled in this area, there’s always room for improvement. Think about how you’d like to be treated if you were the customer and make changes accordingly.
At TurnKey, we are all about helping new sellers get started on Amazon the right way and showing established sellers how to make improvements to their listing, systems, and management, and to set new goals for crushing it in 2020. We’d love to help you if you’re feeling stuck, so head over here to find out EXACTLY how we can help.
Watch Jenna Lieber, our Director of Client Services discuss Amazon Advertising’s Posts feature on this week’s Facebook Live
Amazon advertising has added a new beta program called Posts.
Posts is a browse and discover experience on Amazon that is meant to focus on brand-shopping through posts you are already sharing on social media. Posts helps shoppers discover new products and see what’s new from brands by browsing feeds of brand-curated content that links back to the product listings.
The program is currently free to participate in and promises to have solid metrics that will feature views, impressions, and click-through rates.
Where will Posts show up? Posts will show up on participating brands detail pages, detail pages for related brands, category-based feeds and feeds for related posts.
Amazon advises brands participating in the new program to post as often as they do on social media. The content that is used should be consistent with your brand’s social media presence.
This post was written by our friends at Nine Supply for the TurnKey Success Blog
Every social media strategy should be as unique as the brand it represents. Approaches will vary based on what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, where you’re selling it, and of course, how much of a marketing budget you’re working with. A little planning can go a long way toward making your social accounts a valuable asset for your brand. Not sure where to start?
Here’s our 9 steps to a confident social media strategy:
Decide on KPIs
It might seem counterintuitive, but a larger follower base and higher engagement (things like likes and comments) don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. It’s common for engagement rates to drop off as you rapidly gain followers, both due to algorithms and to the fact that social media platforms want to get you to pay to boost your posts. This is why it’s important to decide what your priority is on each social media platform. Do you value higher engagement versus just wanting to have a ton of followers? Or does your volume of followers speak louder to the companies you are pitching too? Maybe you’re an online magazine, and the daily goal is clicks back to your articles. Find out which key metrics are of the most value to your business, and let those determine your strategy and spend.
Settle on a Budget
Simply put, your budget will determine who you can work with and how much money you can put behind boosting posts. If you already have a full marketing team (i.e. with a marketing director, photographer, designer, copywriter, etc.) and if they’re active on social media and good at staying on top of trends, you might find it best to run your social account in-house. If you only have one or two marketing people on your team (or if you’re running it yourself!), consider hiring an outside team to manage this piece of the pie. In that case, they should do the next 6 things for you, with as much or as little input as you want to give. Just make sure you shop around and choose an agency with a good social media aesthetic (their Instagram page should wow you) and a portfolio of brands that have goals similar to yours.
Split Testing
At Nine Supply Social, we always talk about consistency. But, it’s important to play around a little, too, so you can make sure you’re confident in the practices you adopt. The things that perform best for one brand aren’t always a slam dunk for another. Choose a few things to keep consistent while you play around with variables like imagery, tone, scheduling, and hashtags. When you find a good formula, keep refining it until you’ve built a polished look and feel for your brand. Rebrands will happen, and algorithms change, but it’s important to lay a foundation that your customers come to trust, and this testing early on can help you figure out your secret sauce.
Find Your Audience
Do a quick inventory of the followers your brand already has. Who is following you? Is this your target audience, and if not, you need to either rethink your social strategy, or who your target customer is? Figure out if there’s a particular region where these people live, where they work, where they spend their money. When you have a solid audience nailed down, this will help determine the look and feel you want your social media posts to have.
Establish a Voice
For instance, if the audience you’ve decided to target is young moms, develop a persona based around this psychographic. Make sure that their values and your company values line up, and that you’re communicating this in a tone that they’ll want to engage with. Besides captions, you can showcase your brand personality in your actual posts with motivational quote graphics, funny memes, statistics, or other types of short, easily digestible written content.
Choose an Aesthetic
What’s going to stop the scroll? If you’re a CPG brand or product, you’ll want to take into account the type of packaging that you have, and the colors and branding you’re already working with, so that you can maintain a cohesive look. Look into current design trends and find a color palette that both complements your packaging and can act as a bridge into the trendy world that is social media.
Establish Some Content Pillars
When someone scrolls through your posts, they should see a variety of content, such as lifestyle and studio shots. It’s good to keep things dynamic — for instance, many brands will choose to alternate these two types of shots so that the way the posts line up (by threes), there are never two of the same kind next to each other or on top of each other.
Get Into a Rhythm
Some brands post at the same time every day, while others might post three times a week, supplementing with daily stories. Play around and see what works for your brand. If you notice that you get great engagement on your posts but actually tend to lose followers every time you post, maybe you’re overwhelming your audience by posting too often. At the same time, algorithms often reward freshness and frequency. Try working up toward a more frequent cadence as you accumulate imagery, UGC (user-generated content), and followers along the way.
Tap Into the Talent Pool
Influencers are a great way to get introduced to new audiences and collect UGC that you can repurpose on your own page. Your budget will determine the volume and star-power of the influencer you are able to work with, but even if your budget is $0, you can still find quality partners with whom to collab. Reach out to micro-influencers who seem to resonate well with your intended audience, and offer them free product. Many will do stories for free even if they won’t do a dedicated post. Ultimately what you’re looking for is results, right? Once you find the influencers that give you great results and are easy to work with, nurture those relationships and collaborate with them long-term! The partnership will seem more and more authentic as time goes by and their audience will become very familiar with your brand.
We hope these nine steps will help you build a successful social media strategy even if you’re a newbie to the scene. And if you need help along the way, head to Nine Supply’s social and website for more in-depth blogs and quick social hacks!
Watch Jenna Lieber, our Director of Client Services discusses Amazon’s Attribution Program on this week’s Facebook Live
Have you been struggling to track your external ads to Amazon? Here’s your answer!
Amazon has added another tool to their arsenal, this time a tool that will help external advertisers track their external ads like Facebook and Google ads.
Using Amazon Attribution you will be able to track Amazon detail page views, purchase rate, and sales.
As you all know, Amazon has made it challenging to track the success of external ads leading to Amazon. But through this program you will be able to measure the impact of off-Amazon ads with on-demand reporting that will grab data on how customers research, discover, and purchase your product on Amazon.
This program can be a game changer to help you measure, optimize, and plan your external ads for Amazon.
Not running external ads to Amazon? Our TurnKey team suggests that you target past Amazon customers using your Amazon customer list in Facebook advertising.
In this article we briefly mention Amazon Giveaways. While the rest of the article is still up to date and valid, as of October 10, 2019, Amazon Giveaways is no longer a feature hosted by Amazon. We loved this strategy so much and are sad to see it go. That being said, the principles that made the giveaway effective still apply:
Leverage social media, email lists, etc. in order to send people over to a landing page to collect even more customer email addresses.
Use squeeze pages to share more information and connect with customers. Video is a fantastic medium to include on the landing page because it gives you the unique opportunity to talk to your customers and pitch to them as if you were in the same room.
Offer a discount code to people who watch the video.
So don’t worry just because Amazon isn’t offering this feature anymore. You can still find ways to incorporate the aspects of this strategy in order to impress your customers and increase sales! If you need more support, we have lots of other strategies to help you grow your sales, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
As a seller on Amazon, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two days out of the year that you don’t want to miss out on. The numbers speak for themselves. In 2017, a record $5 BILLION was spent on Black Friday and on Cyber Monday another record-breaking $6.59 BILLION! People are on the hunt for the best deals. So what can you do to make sure your Amazon listing gets noticed and ensure you get a piece of the multi-billion dollar pie?
Keyword Research
The first step in preparing for these big shopping days is to implement holiday keyword sponsored ads. Keyword sponsored ads trigger impulse buying and help drive holiday sales.
Start by creating a list of keywords for the holidays. Think about the words prospective customers might be searching for as they go to buy on Amazon. Some examples include: “Black Friday deals”, “Cyber Monday gifts for her”, and “best Christmas gifts”. Our go-to tool for creating keyword lists is MerchantWords. Once you have your list together, use the keywords you found and include them in your sponsored ads. Once you have the campaign you can pause and unpause it for years to come!
Images and Videos
The next step is to change your images to reflect the holiday spirit. This is the best place to get creative! Do this by superimposing a holiday bow on the main image, adding a picture of your product under the Christmas tree, including an image of a child opening your product as a gift, or embellishing your image with a holiday-related background.
If you are brand registered and really want to take your listing to the next level, consider adding a video that is tailored to the holidays. Think of the impact a video of someone who fits within your target demographic sitting next to their tree on Christmas morning excitedly opening a box that contains your product while their loved ones watch. A video makes connecting to your customers a no-brainer!
The idea of adding these images and videos is to paint a picture in the shopper’s mind of what it would look like to give your product as a gift. This makes the buying decision much easier on them!
Coupons and Promo Codes
Promo codes show up on your product details page at the bottom and should be geared towards the holidays and upcoming shopping days. To make the most out of your promo codes and optimize sales, try running a pre-sale promotion, a day of the sale price, and then an extended sale offering.
Some examples of promotions are:
PRE-BLACK FRIDAY SALE COUPON TAKES 35% OFF WHEN YOU BUY 4 OR MORE, OR 30% OFF 3, 25% OFF 2, OR 20% OFF 1 OF ANY [INSERT PRODUCT]
On the other hand, coupons get more visibility on Amazon because they show up on the details page at the top, in the search results, on the gold box deals page, and on a separate landing page just for coupons on Amazon. If you decide to use a coupon, when a customer is on your listing and they click the “clip it’ button, the discount is applied at checkout. However, keep in mind that there is a cost per clip.
To give your products an even better shot at optimizing sales on these big shopping days, run a promo code and coupon at the same time for more visibility. When creating them, don’t forget to make each one exclusive so they can’t be used together!
Cross-Selling
When it comes to selling around the holidays, cross-selling is a game-changer. It increases the profit margin on low-cost items, adds value to your items, helps get rid of slow-moving inventory, and gives you more keywords to rank for.
Cross-selling involves creating promotions that combine multiple products or including images of other complementary products all on the same page. Utilizing cross-selling in your product images or bundles takes your product to the next level and offers you more visibility. Please keep in mind that it is especially important to keep your bundles geared towards the holidays.
Social Media
As customers are searching for that perfect gift for their friends and family, social media has begun to play a larger role in the gift selection process. Utilize your social media accounts to help you engage with customers and make them aware of the deals that you have coming up.
This is the time to have fun, be creative, and above all, get festive and spread some holiday cheer!
Pinterest: Add a “Top 5 Hottest [Insert Your Niche] Gifts This Season” Rich Pin on Pinterest so customers can stay informed about your product and get alerts for price changes.
Instagram: If you have 10K+ followers, utilize the swipe up feature to get customers directly to your listing. If not, utilize your Instagram stories to highlight your deals.
Facebook: Run a contest where all customers who purchase your product and post about it are entered into a drawing for a larger holiday gift package.
Twitter: A trivia contest might be just the thing to get your followers engaged and keep them aware of the deals you’re offering.
YouTube: Utilizing Amazon Giveaway, you can create a buzz around your product, secure more views for your YouTube videos and increase sales all at the same time. Another option is going live on your channel. This gives you a chance to interact with your followers, showcase your products and answer questions about them.
We hope you found these holiday selling tips helpful. Let us know how they work for you and if you have any other strategies that are effective for your listings. Happy holidays!
